Death of the Cool

Long ago in the city I had a chaste affair with a client of the art gallery where I worked.  It was sponsored and encouraged by my boss and ended when he went back to Greece. He left me a tasteful Tiffany bracelet the value of which far exceeded the sum total of all my possessions at the time.  So I returned it-- and with the proceeds I bought a great raincoat and a Husqvarna Sewing Machine-- absolute top-of-the-line with a set of fancy stitch cams and multiple accessories.  It was white metal, weighed a ton; at the time I made things and this was like the Porsche of equipment. I sewed quilts galore... wedding presents and baby gifts-- pillow, comforters... I cut up childhood dresses and patched them together; I amassed Liberty handkerchiefs and thrift-shop scrap bags. It was my companion... it welcomed me after work and kept me company through the nights I waited up for whichever musician I was living with at the time. I couldn't wait to get home to it.

Like any well-made machinery, it required maintenance.  When I took up rock and roll in earnest, I neglected it. Decades. At some point after 9/11 I discovered it was self-oiling and failed from lack of use, so I frantically searched repairs. Of course the obvious shops were not in my budget.  I instead went exploring the fashion district and came upon a tiny sliver of a storefront chock full of old machines. One had to sidestep inside down a narrow hallway to reach a worktable/counter behind which was a high wall of shelving stacked with hundreds of machines-- tagged, untagged-- all varieties.  A small, elderly Chinese man with little English greeted me and when I wrote out the brand name, he lit up.  $30, he said. Favorite. Two week.  So I lugged the thing on three subways to 27th Street and confidently left it in what I was sure were his competent hands.

You're crazy, said my boyfriend at the time.  The guy is a mechanical disaster. No, no, I insisted.  He is a genius. He has psychic diagnostic powers and magical hands. Two weeks later I called the number he wrote down on a crumpled scrap of Chinese newsprint and after about twenty rings he picked up, told me he needed a part and it would be another two weeks-- maybe another $20.  This went on... I was in and out of town; I let it go.  I prayed to the Swedish and Chinese gods.

Eight months later, I collected it, paid $60 cash, got it home to find it only sewed in reverse. Well... my Swedish neighbor upstairs was so overjoyed to see his own country's brand, he borrowed it and swore he'd get it going. I left it up there for years.  He actually fixed my black raincoat-pocket and other things.  He died several years ago; it sits now in my closet, waiting-- neglected. The Chinese repair shop is now a luxury high-rise. 

Yesterday someone posted photos of me at a glam rock show wearing a purple satin blouse. I remember how Alan begged me to dress for this one performance where I unfortunately discovered that guitar straps slip right off of satin; it was a rough gig. I'd gone to my friend Jayme's on the UWS to borrow it.. she had closets filled with vintage great clothing and things she'd remade.  It's perfect, she insisted.  No returns... I'd traded her some vinyl, fair and square. I don't know enough about fashion but I took it to a resale place and it sold in one day for a very decent price.  Wow.  Jayme.

So yesterday thinking about her...I stopped at her apartment building on the UWS.  I can't remember when I'd seen her last... years... the pandemic widened these gaps... but she called me every once in a while; we both raised sons on our own... had intimacies to share. The doorman told me she'd moved in with her brother, out of town. I was open-mouthed... she was one of those truly bohemian city fixtures.  Her apartment was old but she created this exotic and homey vibe with purple velvet and just great 'stuff'. She had excellent taste in music, too. Old Stones, Kinks, Faces...  she could tell a cool new band from a poser in a second. She was brusque but also quiet and soft-- formerly sexy and sought-after by rock and roll elite.  One of those lithe women you see among the crowds at Monterrey or Woodstock. Cameras loved her low-slung jeans and hippy tops... her great haircuts. Even when she was broke, people comped her-- her hairdresser, her doctor, her dentist.  It was uncanny. 

Apparently she'd not just left the building.  Late last night, after a deep-search for her brother, I found her three-line obituary, from June. She'd been privately and quietly cremated. I was devastated. No one seemed to know about it... as though she slipped out of a back door when we weren't looking.  She'd done this once at my Thanksgiving dinner; my friends overwhelmed her and she went into the bathroom, maybe got high, and disappeared.  She cared little for food and socializing.  Her magical husband had died young and I think she never moved on from the perfect tantric sex and bohemian heaven he provided. She did come to gigs although she often left early-- quietly.  She was also a valued and an astute critic of my work.  

I'm reading Dawn Powell; following her vintage characters through the post-war version of Greenwich Village is a trip. The apartments-- the fashion-- the wild parties and rituals of entertaining. Aside from the changes technology has imposed on dating, we're fundamentally not all that different.  Just the details-- the interiors-- the materiality.  It's another, much more desirable world. The one I could count on in Jayme's place-- the vinyl, the occult and Goth books, the exotic textiles and the layers of personality. Someone who valued her fostered animals over her own livelihood, and who would not consider life without a paintbox and a sewing machine.

I heard a young woman comment the other day 'Mid-century style is over. No one wants it'.  I took it a little personally. And yes, we Baby Boomers are beginning to outlive our utility. The 1980's and 90's have much more appeal to current generations than the women of Dawn Powell. My apartment is stocked with library, vinyl, instruments, art and tiny memories. Odd trinkets in drawers and old rock-and-roll T-shirts that are losing value. Who will recognize the stained glass heart earrings my college boyfriend made me for our anniversary fifty-five years ago... the leather bracelets I got in Berlin before the wall came down-- the Camden market coat with metal trim...?  Will my son know my Pleaides editions of Proust bought in 1970's Paris or my fifty-three Trollope novels all collected from sundry used bookshops? 

Most days we city dwellers pass thousands of people on the street... and only the few we 'know' will light us up like human candles. The recognition of our trinkets, like old fossils, do the same.  But maybe, like my old sewing machine, they no longer serve.  It occurs to me that Jayme spared us the sentimentality of death and the post-mortem inventorying and distribution. I miss her terribly today and am still recovering from the disbelief of no farewell or phonecall.  No notification, no address, no ceremony, no grave, no tree planting or charity directive. We older people have the illusion that we are what we leave behind... but in truth we have likely outlived our usefulness-- our valued possessions have little meaning to the next generation and while I can hear the endless melodies that spill out from my bookshelves and collections, they will eventually be as mute as the resonant final lesson of Jayme.

What We Think About When We Think About Snow

During one of my random online reading jags which can involve tangent after tangent, winding up in some dead-end cul-de-sac in a country whose name-change has confused me, I somehow got to Joan Didion's list of favorite books. It's been widely circulated, this list, as Joan is fairly universally admired for her clarity and seriously earnest writing. A young writer with less brilliance and direction would want insight into her formula.

I was vaguely reassured that not a single title on the list had escaped me. Remembering I had a small interview published-- years ago, during which I was forced to commit to my own 'desert island' list of novels. Novels, yes... they have always entrapped me, although I wonder now, with my mental timeline diminishing, if I would devour Proust the way I did at twenty-- or Dickens (I think I would)... or why I currently find Thomas Mann's religious novels so satisfying. On and on...

I take great comfort scanning the shelves of my library at night... maintain a fairly rigorous schedule of reading, although I digress. Nor have I been led too far off-course except for the recent discovery of a few forgotten Nobelists and some brilliant contemporary Europeans (nothing in 2025 came close to 'Solenoid' by Mircea Cărtărescu). But lately I've begun to wonder who I was when I read George Eliot or, like Joan, Ford Madox Ford. So I looked further to see when the Didion list had been compiled and for whom.

Snow... today... a sort of blessing, especially weekend snow. As a winter baby, accumulations were a gift. Also the frequency of postponed birthday celebrations... or childhood illnesses... someone always had chickenpox or measles... in those days of nominal vaccinations. How life has changed. My winter reading mostly Jack London or Sigrid Undset... cold American pioneer novels... later, Thomas Mann. And nothing like the Russian winters of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn. As an older adult-- Laxness, Høeg, Fosse... on and on...

So much chatter today about where one was in the blizzard of 1978, or 1983, or 2006. A kind of weather-nostalgia and of course in New York City the snow transforms our landscape-- softens the verticals and rounds sonic edges. I distinctly remember reading Mark Twain as a girl while my father watched football in our jalousied porch room with the Venetian blinds drawn at dusk.

Like many Americans today I binged on football to distract from the disturbing confrontations around the globe. At a point, after hours of football, I get this sort of nausea-- like psychic claustrophobia. My father had his first major nervous breakdown during a blizzard weekend. The panic of being shut in with his young family-- the responsibility, the claustrophobia... the scent of whiskey in that room with the newspapers strewn around and the snowy visual noise on the TV screens in those days-- black and white, the muffled roar of the crowd from the rear console speaker... the tiny athletes like toys on a static screen.

Maybe I've inherited the football syndrome from my father... shut in here... although me, I pick up a bass and let my fingers wander, and scan walls thinking books do not just furnish a room, they have become my family. Unlike my father's daughters, they require no upkeep; they do not ask questions, they seem to understand how the narcissism of this media-obsessed culture has cornered me into a sort of cork-lined analogue stubbornness. They witnessed the process, they populated the years and the memories and will outlive my small-minded existence, will go on to furnish other rooms.

The snow will melt-- eventually, after it acquires the grey five-o'clock shadow of city soot. For now, we are a bit graced-- pardoned, dismissed...postponed. Plenty of city people sleeping off hangovers in the cold morning... regretting or rejoicing the upcoming Super Bowl contenders... dusting themselves off, absolved, a little blessed... a little taste of Arctic innocence. Forgiveness, like many things, will sadly melt away and we are left with what we inherit from our own mistakes. No Super Bowl of life, of country, of existence. In Kiev and Minneapolis and Iran there is no melting; the ICE of another composition and cleanup is not simple. God help us to figure this one out.

What We Miss

To distract myself this week, I'm reading Annie Ernaux.  Turns out it's neither distracting nor particularly shattering.  It does remind me of this nagging voice begging for my own solution to memoir.  We're on a kind of cusp, at this age, where things surface like 8-ball messages, and one fears this will be the last appearance in the cranial integuum. The palimpsest sensation, Annie calls it, conjuring Proust-- uncontested master of the medium-- who never won a Nobel prize. 

I want to go home, my mom repeated over and over in the depths of her dementia.  I am beginning to understand this more as I adapt and re-adapt to a culture which increasingly relies on media for memory. One neither remembers nor forgets; it's all on Instagram. My older friends often post their small accomplishments, as if soliciting accolades they are no longer winning... musicians craving applause from their home studios and bedrooms. I try to be amused.  Like memoir, there is a boundary between resonance and sentimentality.  I still demand a certain level of creativity from myself and fear falling short. 

Thinking back over years with a predominant audio/visual memory, I separate personal eras by rooms-- by apartments, the series of homes we have as an urbanite.  I can still 'see' the nursery where I spent my first two years in a city apartment.  My psychiatrist friend finds this extraordinary; most of the 'frame' is attached to a moment of frustration-- wanting to climb out of my crib to join my family in the hallway. So it's primarily an emotional memory; the visual is something I reconstruct from looking around me, as though it's a photograph.

For some reason today I remembered the first weeks with my son; I'd come back from London, expecting to return, but ended up stuck here with no money, no job... shocked and unprepared for motherhood in a moment when post-natal syndromes were not discussed. On my own, I found a decent job, toured the day-care options.  On the upper east side there was a well-reviewed sort of nursery-- with kind women, clean facilities. Rows of hospital-style cribs held sleeping infants in their little happy pajamas... it was cheerful and peaceful. But suddenly I became maternal... I panicked. The idea of dropping my tiny son every morning to this strange 'home' seemed just wrong.

So I left... I cried, sat in a church pew asking Jesus what I should do-- temporarily living on a dollar bag of yesterday's doughnuts or rolls I picked up at the local Genovese store (how I miss it)-- to support my little family. Somehow I managed... wheeling a carriage up and downtown, getting up once a week at 5 AM and taking a commuter train to leave the baby with his Grandma for an 8-hour shift, returning at the end of the day... I was a little like that TV commercial with the waitress apologizing to her boss for her child, promising it would not happen again. And I was exhausted.  At night I did bass gigs to keep my sanity. Occasionally I dragged him to songwriting sessions and even studios.  Not ideal but we survived. 

I imagine not just my own childhood memories but his... where would they have been had he spent the first two years in a sterile room with twenty other infants?  Would he have become a basketball player? I doubt his little brain would have been the impressive street-smart product of extensive itineraries around the city. 

It occurs to me, watching the constant parade of young parents with their prams and strollers, how the technology has changed everything.  It is simpler to 'watch' one's infant with a caretaker, to access help in an emergency... and also to yield to the temptation to use the phone-- to chat, to respond-- to shop... order food, watch a movie... anything.  In my time I had only the baby for conversation-- I talked, sang to him-- I read Proust, incidentally, out loud.  It was the language-- the sounds... it didn't matter what I said-- it mattered that it was the two of us... a kind of dialogue. We bonded emotionally... we were stuck with one another. We went to the park and played. As he grew he followed our travels on the subway map and learned to read by navigating station signs. He was extraordinary and I loved every minute of those trying and sleep-deprived years. There was a phrase Annie used (trans.) referencing the use of 'life' in her writing: 'we drained reality dry'.

In this era of autism diagnoses, of blame games for learning disabilities, etc... we rarely look at our technology habits as a culprit. To me, there is an epidemic attention deficit; I rarely feel that conversational palpable intimacy... people are texting or receiving or making notes or looking at something. I don't see how children have not adapted to that by becoming less responsive, less investigative.  Babies too often hold tablets and phones and amuse themselves with a screen rather than a sandbox.  Maybe it's an urban thing... but I see it everywhere.  And I talk to babies; I love them. But society is chronically distracted. 

Dementia seems the complement to autism... the denouement of awareness and focus.  As a precursor, I am noticing adults failing to 'see' things... sensitive to being criticized but rarely able to access their own self-perception.  We are visually hyperconscious but socially a little myopic.  We miss things... how can one possibly sustain this statistically staggering screen time and the emotional connections daily life used to present as normalcy?  Random conversations, meetings, discoveries.  Meditations and daydreams. Unanticipated moonrises and spontaneous sunsets... that feeling one has lived a lifetime in a single spectacular unpredictable analogue day.  Where have they gone? 

I rue the time I spend texting on the phone my son makes me carry for safety... but it is mostly turned off. Some of my friends get annoyed that I do not answer calls unless I'm home on my landline and it's a genuine 'call', a conversational visit. Texts are deceptively two sides of an actually one-sided dialogue... I can't shake the feeling that increasing phone-use equates to missing life.  Thinking of giving it up altogether.  Digital memory is not the same, and forgetting is all too allowable when we feel the false security of instagram and Facebook records of moments.  The meaning and quality of memoir will surely change; I feel the urgency to transcribe what I recall; whether or not there will be audience is another quandary.

Recognitions

My friends know I have never been really on top of technology; while I bought and messed with electronic synthesizers and keyboards when they became commercially affordable in the 1970's, I was late to get a computer, lagged far behind in digital 'joinings', and only recently, on the insistence of my son, carry a cellphone for emergencies.

Besides the standard bedside-worthy pile of books, I have an old iPad (2011?)-- for recording inspiration-- lyrics, as they typically come to me in the dark. The fact that one doesn't need to turn on a lamp is convenient.  It also delivers messages-- from the random 10 or 12 people who have access... and the way this penetrates my daily agenda is extraordinary. I can only imagine how the daily psyche of normal people is shaped by the constant barrage of texts which unlike email seem to have full access.  

Since I have lived alone I have the habit, late at night, of browsing my bookshelves. Like leafing through a photo album or web-surfing-- or the hermitic version of taking a drive, it's comforting and reassuring. I have a wealthy person's library, somehow... collected over 60 years by hoarding things I read and loved, lingering in old bookshops in the days when buying was an analogue-only activity and road trips and random travel digressions presented these opportunities.  Libraries used to pare off extra copies--- their sales were extra-serendipitous because the books were almost giveaways-- sorted and pre-filtered by institutional acquisition priorities.

Huge books have punctuated my life... I can vividly remember where I was when I was reading War and Peace or Proust or The Recognitions-- more recently, Peter Nadas, Marguerite Young (still), Thomas Mann. As a girl I fell in love with the sheer weight and reassurance that this was not just a one-night stand, but a long-term relationship.

Last night I wandered across my shelf section of Joseph McElroy... the copy of Women and Men I've had for nearly 40 years, and which has been coveted by readers who visit me.  It is unread-- pristine, my copy... for some reason I searched my iPad at dawn and found a Paris Review piece on reading this book-- meeting McElroy-- another of those quintessentially New York City writers who has shaped the urban post-war canon. Like Gaddis-- he's difficult. I shared it with one of my few friends with whom I message.

And then 'I am millimeters from the abyss', I told my friend this morning... it just texted itself... the operative word being 'from'... and I had this image of Dick Van Dyke, just recently celebrated in a video, nearly immolated in his neighborhood wildfire, then being returned to his unscathed home yesterday.  We saw the  photograph-- all of us-- on the 'entertainment' pages... it distracted from the one of Jamie Foxx with stitches, the constant litany of photos of the prep school Valedictorian-turned-murderer.  There is little refuge here from the worrying world-tensions, patriotic anxieties and catastrophic climate threat. 

Most of all I am haunted by not just recent deaths but the ebb-tide of mental skills I am forced to witness among my decreasing circle.  My mother at a point became overwhelmed by an incomprehensible sea of words which whirled around her withering brain like a terrifying tsunami.  A friend has been afflicted with a cruel and progressive form of aphasia which has left her stranded and near-mute on some non-verbal desert island.  My neighbor upstairs who shared my love of literature can no longer see. And a horrific brain tumor has devoured most of the capacity of another.  I visit her and she is beached in a bed, unable to communicate. 

The vertical/horizontal grid of bookshelves has always been stabilizing. And the books are my friends... my mentors; they are my past, my present, and many of them are inside me. It is a great comfort to scan the titles at night-- to pull one out and know it is there-- all of it-- with a kind of permanence. The diminishing number of unread ones beckon... Don't leave me, they call out at night... We have not yet become intimate.  It is a kind of future for me, at the edge of this looming unknown catastrophe before which many of us graze at this age.  

This year I have been more or less fortunate to have survived and mostly recovered from an accident which temporarily froze my daily activity.  It helped me understand and appreciate the pitfalls of human existence, and left me a little more grateful for the outcome, considering the odds and the ends of blind human faith. 

As a girl and a teenager we had a few end-of-year family rituals-- every New Year's Eve my Mom would ceremoniously wish me a blessed future;  it became a compulsory phone-call as we aged, with a little bit of superstitious 'prevention' in the mix.  When she passed away, all bets were off, so to speak. I mark her absence most of all at that end-of-year moment, she who was most responsible for my existence, for the blessings... for the strength with which I rehabbed myself over the past 10 months. She was not much of a reader herself, but she read to us as children-- Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson--- Francis Hodge Burnett and A. A. Milne-- Frank Baum and C.S. Lewis... Johanna Spyri, Lucy Ward Montgomery...on and on... it was a bedtime ritual which I carried on with my own son, but being a musician and having night-working hours I often left a cassette tape to read him to sleep. 

The perceived acceleration of time this year-- the occasional empty hours and the speed of days-- obsesses me.  I cannot seem to make things matter more, although I still write my poems and make my songs. Few care about what I do-- fewer read or witness. Whether or not 'recognition' has a sort of parental role in adult lives is something we struggle with.  Celebrity, fame... seem to equate less and less with quality of work, although that is a bit of sour grapes.  At the edge of this sense of passing, I am propping up the months with my reading lists and projects; it helps anchor one's existence in a rocking sea of the unknown. There is travel and romance for some; for me there is the opportunity to spend long hours with the creations of great minds-- to mix my thoughts with theirs, to blend my flaws and weaknesses and come out with a possibly better version.  For my dwindling friends to whom I confide dark morning thoughts, I will try... I will turn the page of another year, God willing. 

Songs from a Room

In the familiar old heat of my beloved 'back room' last night, as is my habit, between 2 and 5 AM, I was watching films. On these dense airless summer days, it's always a little warmer in here, as it is colder in winter. We're fortunate to have this 'extra' space-- old, soft sofas and chairs-- the TV-- my little closet writing nook, random guitars and basses on the furniture... and a wall of books, of course.  The ceiling fan occasionally makes a sort of ticking sound, like the proverbial clock on the wall... my only company.

I have lived in this apartment far longer than anywhere else-- far longer than I anticipated.  I can look around and remember the various configurations of this room-- when it was virtually empty, and children used it for train layouts and games-- when two sofa beds were often made up to accommodate overseas guests and stragglers-- when I struggled with a novel, staring up at an enormous fat monitor with a blue screen and white text, dreading the alarm which signaled the dissolution of my solitude into breakfast-prep and getting my son to school on time.

There is a fire escape outside one window, although I rarely go out there now... an occasional visiting bird reminds me, but city ordinances forced us to remove plants and other 'hazards' (an old rocking chair, etc.)... and now this has become a bit like my personal Proustian cork-lined refuge.  In the back of these old buildings which converse easily via courtyards and alleys, nights are quiet. I hear the hum of air conditioners and motors but little else besides the strange sort of symphonic white-noise of the city which always feels about to crescendo and then doesn't.  It's indescribable, this soundtrack; not many are privileged enough to hear it... but there are these films I see--- mostly the kind with little dialogue-- which use this sort of atmospheric noise like an orchestral score. 

Still in the swampy-thick of this Nersesian mega-novel, I feel a little hallucinatory and anxious about the status of my city.  On the screen now there is a 1960's shot from an airplane approaching Manhattan-- no WTC towers, but the poetic density of older New York.  It feels so vulnerable.  We watch air-strikes in Gaza, in other parts of the world... vintage footage of post-war destruction... and I cannot fathom that I have earned some right to feel so 'safe' here in my back room which from the heat-emitting effects of cable boxes and laptops is warmer than the outside temperature.

Then there is a mediocre c. 2000 movie with Ben Affleck.  He's a wonderful actor-- and his inherent intelligence shines always.  Here he is young and boyish, as I always remember him; his teeth are still his own-- he transcends the banal dialogue and we believe him; he is himself.  The version we have now of a darkened and disgruntled playboy is not right.  Forget about sexual appetites and attractions... he doesn't belong with the Beyonce'd version of Jennifer Lopez he got this year.  He's complicated and critical and, like the best of us, a little self-loathing. 

But it was so long ago-- the making of this film.  He was a boy.  I was a considerably younger woman and actors like Brad Pitt were in their 'young' prime. As we see these people age, it reminds us that we are that much older, that we are uncomfortably close to some kind of final denouement.  I inventory various configurations of my life, often; my son doesn't remember details of his childhood-- maybe it was the intrusion of technology which distracted from absorbing the minutiae of reality. Personally, I can provide an inventory of my mother's old 1950's kitchen-- the black cast-iron trim on the maple cabinets, the green formica and the deco table and vinyl-upholstered Breuer-style chairs.  I can open the pantry and see the various jars of sweet pickles and mustards and relishes-- the ketchup bottles and cans of sardines and tuna.  I can read the labels and smell the vaguely cinnamon/cardamon scent of her little collection of bottled spices.  

And still I wonder when these things will fade--- when I won't be able to mentally circle my second-grade classroom and name every child in the seats. Some of my friends don't remember their teachers' names.  In school I was often told I had a sort of not photographic but phonographic memory.  I could recall conversations in real-time.. I could hear voices as though played back in a certain core of my brain.  Not so much anymore, but a few of those moments resonate.

Last weekend I went up to see my beloved neighbor Patricia. She is still smart as a whip, but at 98 she has to admit some frailties. She can barely see now, and it's a struggle to listen to me read to her. Last week I brought up a large book of photographs which really interested her; her comments were astute and enhanced the text. She knew these people and these places, and the backstories.  But I also realized the challenge of 'reading' a photograph-- the way companions must translate reality for a blind person.  There was one in the museum several weeks ago.  He was being wheeled around and his 'minder' was doing a fair job of listing paintings, but not really the job I could only infer this man required.  

So I tried my hardest-- to describe the sense of space-- the distances, the attitudes, how a model's hair was styled, how it had been raining and the streets were reflecting... what the weather might have been from the clothing.  It was tedious.  I exhausted her, and my descriptions were so suffused with personal suppositions and editorializing.  A picture is worth 1000 words; mine were cheap and inadequate.  But for those of us who can see, we take so much for granted-- we waste so much time; we fret and bemoan ridiculous things, we sacrifice to marginally improve our appearances (some of us)... and in the end... we have merely the past, an unappreciated present and a tenuous future. Picture this and picture that, one of my early songs sang in its chorus.  'Picture this, the morning after... the camera won't lie like you.' I still remember these and most of the thousands of lyrics.  Picture that.

Parallel Stories

I'm reading Péter Nádas.  'I have spent my life between imagination and reality' is the translated catch-phrase that comes up in an internet search, from a widely-seen brief interview in his native language.  Years ago, I read the Book of Memories which was highly praised by Susan Sontag and described as Proustian; it was well worth the time investment. 

This time it's Parallel Stories--  received with mixed reviews. Among these were comments on the more-than-1100 pages as 'not quite the disaster of Brodkey's Runaway Soul' (which I managed to complete), but flawed.  It took 18 years to write. Like Mann's Joseph quartet-- also under-read at some 1500 pages, the author considers this his masterpiece.  I respect that, often consider the fact that the best songs I think I have ever written receive the fewest 'listens' on streaming media.  

It's hard to explain the attraction these huge novels have for me-- Proust, Mann, Bolaño, Gaddis, etc... even David Foster Wallace, more recently. As my personal hourglass runs down, the blessing of my well-stocked bookshelves and stacks and piles of run-over compels me... while I still have the bandwidth, although one never knows when one's capacity takes a hit; my memory for long-ago titles, plots, etc... is failing. 

More than any event in my life, the pandemic altered the wiring of my brain.  Grief, shock, solitude-- the coincidence of age and eventlessness... changed things.  I found myself distance-walking often-- monologuing, singing to myself-- inventing narratives and weaving a sort of quasi-literary alter-ego in my head.  Some of these voices wrote themselves into poems-- as though all I did was transcribe.  But once the trauma of grief left me with a little peace, I substituted the intimacy of authorial narrators of literature... they became my deep companions. 

Long novels allow the writers to wander down corridors of memory, to pursue tangents beyond what one normally allows in daily life. Some of these are obsessive and uber-technical; others autopsy old loves, bare and dissect already-naked moments to the point of repulsion.  Criticism of Parallel Stories highlights  the more awkward passages and there are some truly cringeworthy ones.  Readers who grew up on Joyce are accustomed to explicit familiarity with body functions and explorations.  Few pursue these long novels for prurience or eroticism; there is way too much of that imminently accessible in all media.

But generally, I trust these writers-- I forgive them their excesses and cannot fathom the editing.  Nádas alleges that he writes in longhand and an assistant transfers to computer.  Then there are the translators. Being a diligent reader, I sometimes look at maps of Budapest and Berlin-- I brush up on the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Politics, history--  are the fundamentals and rediscovering is part of the joy of unraveling these novels. European authors have wars and bloody legacies in their private visions. 

To put some disturbing icing on the 100-page chapter of tedious sexual excess I finished, last night I watched two Michel Haneke films.  My neighbor-- a writer-- is a huge fan of Funny Games and recommended these. So, The Seventh Continent was just a brilliantly visual piece of cinematic art with very little dialogue that pulled through to what you knew would be a horrifying end... but still you kept on.  These films of personal horror-- the exploration of the range of evil-- of cruelty and sadism-- done not like Hollywood but with a sort of chilling matter-of-fact quiet-- well, they haunt one.

My physical therapist and I spend most of our sessions talking about literature.  He has just finished Paradise Lost and went on to Céline and Henry Miller.  It occurs, as he torments me in the name of rehabilitation, there's a kind of ironic parallel to the things we watch and read.  The possibilities and random incidents in a city- -the falls, the accidents, the smashes and crashes.. and the episodic street violence... discourages some people from taking daily risks.  The catalogue of films and movies-- the gore and blood and terror-- has surely anesthetized us to the massive global human suffering we see on the news.  And still I heard my neighbor scream when she cut her finger mildly with a kitchen knife... and a woman who fell off her scooter today-- nothing besides a bruised pair of leggings.  But the screams-- they stayed with me. 

These massive historical novels, years past the events they reflect, remind not only of the horrific immediacy of battlegrounds-- of the aggressive and shameful human tendencies wars and violence force men to summon... but of the consequence... of the future.  It's not the event but the echoes, going forward-- the psychological scars and warped behaviors we humans tend to invent to somehow repair old wounds we never deserved in the first place.  Impossible to go through life unscathed, but so much we could do in the name of prevention. Football players wear so much padding; the rest of us-- especially the children of war... are so unprotected.  When the blood dries and the limbs heal-- or not-- there will be some indelible residue of evil-- of endless disturbing parallel stories. 

La Recherche des Chaussettes Perdues

The other evening, skimming through a drawer in my son's old room, I came across an infant sock.  In a Proustian moment, I was sucked into one of those emotional 'rivers' of the past. The tiny sock was decorated with charming colorful train cars, but like something one no longer sees. I could recall with some clarity how this was the first article of clothing that seemed to engage my baby boy at three or four months.  He'd stare at his feet particularly in this pair of socks... wave them around and coo.  No other pair-- no matter what color, pattern, picture-- had this effect, like a magic lantern-- they sparked him, gave him a kind of obvious joy.

But one day, as babies do, he must have over-enthusiastically kicked or pulled or randomly peeled during one of our marathon walks through the city... and a sock was gone-- missing. I retraced our steps, frantic... with that new-mother passion, but no success.  There is some statistic somewhere, surely metaphorically speaking, about how humans spend six months of our lives looking for lost socks. That day added significantly to my total.

Perhaps because he is my genetic offspring, he somehow processed the loss... and while I still put the single train-sock on him, and it evoked the same cooing and chirping sounds of obvious happiness, I had to pair it with a blank. He looked at me; he gestured and seemed to even speak in baby gibberish. There is something not quite right, Mom, he wanted to express... something is missing!

One of my all-time favorite photographic essays is Nicholas Nixon's ongoing visual chronicle of the Brown sisters.  Featured in the New York Times several years ago, these are a series of group portraits of four sisters-- taken annually and chronologically-- through their lives. We see them as girls, then as young women, then slowly aging-- shifting positions subtly. We read on their faces their increasing maturity, their deepening texture and complexity, and their tiny sorrows and difficulties.  Maybe because the elder sisters are around my age, I see myself in their composite. Of course in this era of AI, one can digitally age a face in seconds. But nearing fifty analogue years of 'chronicle', the project grows more and more compelling to those of my generation.  

Having weathered both the standard griefs of a normal life as well as the unexpected losses of recent years, I can't help a sense of dread that one year a sister will be gone-- and like a gap tooth in a formerly joyful smile, it will be all about the one who is 'missing'.  This is the reverse poetry of later life-- like the negative space of a photograph or the shadow which replaces its source, it is the absence that concerns me.  And I can't help imposing my emotional prejudices and narratives-- reading in their faces a break-up or abandonment-- of pain or suffering-- current and future illness.  There must be a dark one afflicted with some inherent unhappiness, a conflict or secret issue.

But they all seem so healthy... and so blessed in their sisterhood, their loving and tiny brushes against one another-- the gestures and casual affectionate touching.  Both posed and unposed, bravely facing the camera in a sort of womanly and familial solidarity... despite the passage of time, the disappearance of youth, one cannot help but envy.  Even the oldest, who is first to display the facial ravages of natural aging-- well, we know she is the fulcrum... especially loved by the photographer, her husband, whose compositional embrace is the 'extra'-- the 'other'-- less visible subject. 

What we don't see, what we supply-- the loves, the children-- the careers and informational details of these women who we implicitly trust-- and maybe one more than the others.  For me I am compelled by the eldest-- her womanly soul, her maternal-ness.  She is slightly ahead of me in years, has outwardly changed herself the least (even her hair is quite the same)-- she who in her graceful aging is deeply long-loved by her husband, to the extent that the gestalt of the sisters became part of their intimacy.  

A near-fifty-year marriage is like a sort of sea.  The extremes-- the shifts, the rhythms and constant motion-- the storms and dramas, thrashings, drownings, and then the future goes on with or without.  I never managed to log enough in either of mine to complete a journey; they were rather like crossings or explorations.  A little landlocked and seasick, I disembarked before they fully revealed. Contemplating the Brown sisters, the rich chronology of lives, I feel a bit remiss.  It's not exactly regret, but like my baby son sensing the lost sock in his underdeveloped intellect, you are not exactly sure but something seems to be missing.  

More than anything, ironically, it is the unseen which I 'see'-- the omnipresent photographer who understood the joys and the tiny sorrows, through all the ages he had known.  And for knowing-- for recognizing love, for somehow creating a future out of the present, and documenting a past which touches us all.  God protect the Brown sisters, I say to myself almost selfishly.  It is something to believe in-- something solid and real, bright and fading, old and new.  

I doubt my son would remember the tiny sock, if I showed it to him... nor would he have the sentimental response, if I tried to impart the narrative, or the patience to listen.  Sometimes I think he has taken a practical reverse life-lesson from me who has spent an inordinate amount of time searching for lost things, for sensing the missing even before it disappears. But maybe that is a clue to our lives-- that we must love what we have, here in the present-- even the small things, before they are washed away by the seas of life which will have their way with us all, in the end.

My Rider In the Dark

I often wake during the night and browse the news on an iPad my son gave me.  Somehow the technology offers a variety of platforms I would not normally see.  Yesterday, among the dismal global disarray and haunting obituaries was an odd story about a horse which had run off with a pack of wild mustangs and returned, 8 years later-- some pounds thinner-- but somehow, like a Jack London novella, he'd made his way back home.  Of course, unlike the novella, we know nothing of his wanderings-- like a teenager kidnapped by a cult or a runaway gang-- he'd had a life... and somehow decided it wasn't for him.

So I had a stray dog, years ago; he passed me on a street in Harlem, and we both looked back at the same instant, like star-crossed lovers.  He followed me; I fed him.  A few days later I had to go 'on the road' for a gig-weekend, left him with a friend who tied him outside the Broome Street bar while he had a beer.  The dog broke loose, returned to my apartment several miles uptown.  It was extraordinary.  He had some strange habits... God only knew from whence he came, and what had formed his canine version of urban-wild. He was unpredictable.  I made up stories and songs... he was moody-- sometimes affectionate and obedient, but most of the time he was wild and callow and kept a perpetual eye on the door or open window. 

My mother's father left her mother, with two children... never to return.  It warped her, surely, and prompted her to marry a strong man with straight edges-- a war-hero with a certain chip on his shoulder-- my father.  She worshipped him, never criticized.  Her Mom, my Grandma, passed away at a very young age, in her so-called prime.  Did she grieve his absence? I never met her, but I think not. In highschool my Mom's estranged father (presumably my Grandfather) phoned- invited her to his 80th birthday.  She'd not seen him for at least 35-40 years, and declined, with a cold edgy voice (I listened in, as you could do in those old days).  Shortly thereafter he died, and while I begged, she would not let me accompany her to the funeral.  It upset her... after all these years, and in those days, when I was 15 or so and she was still a beautiful woman, she occasionally confided in me.  At the service, her obstetrician.. who had delivered her, was there-- took her aside and assured her there was not a drop of her alleged father's blood in her.  She related this to me, confidentially.  I was an imaginative teenager who wrote stories.  I invented all sorts of scenarios... who were we, after all?   

At Christmastime that year this obstetrician phoned and invited her and her daughters (us) to his grand home somewhere upstate.  She declined.  I begged and pleaded...  but in the end she buried this bit of information and never spoke again of her father.  I don't even think I'd seen a photo of him; there were few enough of my beautiful Grandma and they were snatched up by various cousins.  I mean-- he was a bad father... why was it that she refused to abandon the original narrative?  I don't know...

When I was about 17, an English man approached me and told me he was my real Grandfather.  It seemed plausible... and on my roguish post-college discovery path, it was a kind of fairy-tale.  It appealed. I listened and accepted... he took me all sorts of places and introduced me to Chinese literature and writers I'd not known about (William Gaddis, John Gardner).  He painted, spoke all kinds of languages... told me my Grandma had been a great beauty and he was a boy at the time.  It's unlikely but I believed.  I visited him; he affectionately called me his little mouse or his monkey. Unlike my father he praised my little original songs and was first on line at the London Virgin Megastore to buy my album.  You're right in front of Madonna, he rejoiced (alphabetically only).  He felt like a Grandfather.. and besides, it engendered all sorts of identity odysseys.  

I remember once I came home early after school and the gardener's truck was parked in the driveway.  The house was wide open, with the fragrance of freshly-baked pie. My poor oppressed but still beautiful mother, ditto the gardener, were nowhere to be seen.  I started to climb the staircase to the bedrooms, my heart pounding... but turned around and left the house-- came back hours later, loudly announcing my arrival.  My mother's favorite song was Me and Mrs. Jones.  We watched Billy Paul on Soul Train.  She had the record-- we played it over and over and she sang it.  It gave me joy to see her eyes tear up... we sang together.  

But it occurs to me-- especially in the pre and early post-war years-- that there were all kinds of secrets.  Every family has them.  I have them.  My women friends in successful marriages often tell me the secret to this success is precisely in what remains hidden.  Why confound their spouse when they can reminisce with me about old affairs and crushes? You're only as sick as your secrets I learned at an Alanon meeting.  I did not understand what this meant. I did once tell my son-- it's okay to have secrets as long as someone knows each one... you spread them around, you do not harbor them.  It's healthier.  One of my character flaws is I generally preferred the narratives of my affairs and mistakes; they felt familiar and exciting. 

The literary market is flooded with memoir-- some good, some bad, some fictional.  How can one reveal secrets without conscripting unwilling acquaintances? Or like Proust or Kerouac, do we rape our lives for material? Water it down, romanticize it?  Tonight I watched Interview with the Vampire. I don't normally like Vampire stories but I'd read this one on a plane so long ago. During one of the interview sections which punctuate the episodes, the writer asks 'Is this reality or is this performance?' Even vampires have secrets... maybe especially vampires.  Why would we expect truth from an immortal? Why would he be capable of love, or inclined to tell his truth? 

In the Ethicist column of the Times today there was a query from someone wondering whether she should tell her neighbor's child that her husband is his real father (they'd had an affair).  There are days when I wonder whether I am my father's child.  Certainly not by personality or temperament.  Besides, I am the dark daughter. Neither of my parents had the black hair and eyes-- they were fairer. I am taller than my sister who has the curvy body of my father's family.  My mother called me often her dark horse... which brings us back to Mongo the runaway stallion who surely knows more than he reveals.  My hero of the day.  I've been walking around with the Led Zeppelin vision of Traveling Riverside Blues in my head-- every time they or Robert Johnson mention 'my rider' I get a little chill.  It opens me, as music does, sometimes... especially when it cuts right to the chase, and finds those buried horse-hearts.  

Vacation Vicarious

I'm reading the collected Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis, a Colombian poet whose alter-ego is the narrator. Generally I like to read 'cold' books (Jack London, the Scandinavians) in this slice of peak-summer, but Maqroll's tales are jungle-rivery and steaming. Hallucinatory.  I discovered this book by accident in a thrift shop where I also discovered I was lacking even the $1 cost of a priceless literary journey.  The counterman-- an African who seems to broadcast on his phone-mic one side of a perpetual conversation to some fictional recipient-- insisted by gesture I take the book-- way too many in the store, what's $1 to him?  I have thanked him many times over.

In the claustrophobia of air-condition-less nights, to the hum of my neighbor's machines, I remain awake, empathically quasi-feverish, relishing the luxury of a free sauna experience to the book-track of tropical indulgences and terrors.  Mutis has obviously read Dickens and maybe even Proust... I trust him; I believe him.  He is escaping the predatory hauntings of too much education.  Bookery.  I can remember my Fifth-grade teacher, an ancient fragile-skinned hairnetted woman reading us a daily installment of The River Ran East... a perilous Peruvian journey that kept me from missing school even when I was genuinely sick.  As an adult, processing the internet, I was finally able to locate a used copy.  Unfortunately my own son did not enjoy the readings as much as we elementary schoolers of the early 1960's.

Still, there is nothing like a great story in the summer months.  The heft of a book in your bag, the tug of words on a cooled subway car, the hangover of someone else's exotic itinerary in your urban head. Walking across town in the evening, watching the local street population manage their opportunities... the garbage pickers, the lucrative can and bottle industry-- these people work hard for their survival.  In the heat they blend into my imaginary fictions, become characters and heroes... the man in the wool hat and down parka with his cart and bag, face worthy of a Van Gogh portrait... he is woven into the tapestry of today's narrative somehow.  He is a hero.. an actor... Hollywood or 112th Street... no matter.

There is little dialogue interference in my dog-days; I do not use a cell phone-- the street noise and fragments of conversation seep into one of the layers of perception but not as deeply as what I read or dream.  Sometimes I speak silently to my friends who have recently passed-- Alan, Jane... as though they are within some palpable frequency I can still access.  They are 'present'... Alan, when I play guitar at night-- his scent still in my living room, his stage-sweat embedded in my instruments.  And Jane-- last night I watched a film made in Minneapolis... if only you'd stayed in the Midwest, passed up the Studio 54 nights, the limos to Regine's... you might have avoided the animal tragedies, the schizophrenic boy outside your window becoming a man-- calling, keeping you awake... then the cancer, the sentence of suffering.  The loose ending.

Some days I think I should have been a photographer.  I see things-- I frame things.  I'd have been good-- maybe even successful, although the current Maqroll inside of me asks-- 'What the fuck is success?' 

There's a woman who sits on a bench inside the park, uptown, reading Dickens.  This month it's Martin Chuzzlewit.  She edits a very prestigious review; I gifted her a copy of my new book and now I suspect she is terrified of me.  I'm sure she has long-nurtured disdain for local poets and writers... and conversation.  I'm not sure why I am obsessed with knowing what people read-- not too much else interests me lately.  Sometimes in the hot nights I troll my own shelves for undiscovered treasure.  There is enough there for several lifetimes and I will sadly never know all of them.  I watch television-- documentaries and films... with the demon of guilt on my shoulder; I have so much work to do, so much to read...  any scene anywhere with bookshelves both comforts and provokes anxiety.  I squint my eyes at all the home-sets of newscasters and interviewees to see what they've read, how they arrange the volumes behind them.  A few of them are literally 'sets'... like they offer Zoom backdrops somewhere on the internet.  Will it never stop-- the make-up, the plastic surgery, the fakery?

Álvaro, who has probably been the target of assassins, been shot at and jailed... has been dead now for eight years.  I cannot tell him how my first post-pandemic summer has been stamped with his character, how his adventures and philosophy have permeated the hot soup of my malleable July brain syndrome,  how somehow his Gaviero guided me through another itinerant heat-spell and imbedded in the imagery of my dream-scrapbook.  Such is the leap-frogging nature of literature... why we poor writers are compelled to diary and serialize, to chronicle and complain, celebrate and invent... relentlessly, like this heat, which soon enough will disappear... God willing, to return next year, for those among us fortunate enough to be given another 'revolution' of planetary adventure.

Oh what will you give me...

When I was 16, my parents sent me on one of those international exchange programs.  I chose Mexico where I lived as a native in a rural place in the state of Veracruz.  It was a life-changing time; my host family had never even seen an airplane-- had no electricity or plumbing-- and there was nothing but our common humanity to provide a basis for bonding.  I ate strange food, rose with the roosters, lived simply and without worry.  At the end of my stay, all the students in the Americas met up at an international conference in Mexico City at the soccer stadium, where I was asked to play my guitar and sing something uniquely American.  I performed Universal Soldier in front of a massive audience; I even got an encore.  Racking my brain to find a song promoting world peace and unity, I tried out The Bells of Rhymney but halfway through the second verse realized I didn't know the words.   I choked, left the stage while the announcer mumbled something about la señorita being 'muy despeinada'.

After I met Andy Warhol several years later (he often passed by the gallery where I worked)  I told him the story, as my first public humiliation.  He laughed and said as long as no one filmed it, it wouldn't be held against me.  I wanted to ask him if that might have been my 15 minutes, but he didn't really like questions; he liked answers.  So many years later, I still dread solo gigs, as much as I feel this is as close to my real core, and am somehow compelled to subject myself to this.  I've analyzed and analyzed: who cares if I'm terrible?  Plenty of people are terrible?  Nothing helps, and really, few people care.

I'm not sure if it's my age and impatience, but I've recently found myself reacting with increasing bitterness and cynicism at the state of culture in general.  Music disappoints; I rarely see films or concerts-- I cannot really afford these things anyway.  I know Carnegie Hall lives on, the Philharmonic-- and maybe this is a sad omission but I don't miss them; I have cds and records.  What I do miss is the complete paralyzing excitement of seeing something like the de Kooning women in the 1960's-- Andy's wallpapered room of cows-- the first Graffiti show, early Jean-Michel… Hendrix.  John Lee Hooker-- before I knew about him, or Tim Buckley in the 1960's.  I've wondered if I'm just too old and ruined to see anything with new eyes.

My neighbor is a famous editor and writer.  His work is indisputably important and post-modern.  He is critical of what I do, although he occasionally praises me.  There's a certain snobbery in his circle; contemporary writing has to be tough and terse.  I browsed one of his recent books; one section is just a list of words… difficult words, uncomfortable words outside of most people's reach.  Okay… maybe like a Donald Judd or some minimal sequential thing-- but Judd has a certain universal, unpretentious simplicity.  The literary version is awkward and I hated it.

Personally I know my poetry is flawed; it is human and personal and maybe too emotional.  It is overly confessional and sympathetic, and I want it to be accessible and not difficult.  I think I'm not sure whether at this stage of my life I'd fall in love with Proust again, or be able to read Georges Perec or even Jean Genet with the intensity I gave these so many years ago.  I might be critical of Henry James now, or find Trollope excessive or silly.  I cringe occasionally at Anne Sexton; I worshipped her in the 1970's.  Some of the books my neighbor promotes-- well, they are brilliant, in a way--- but they do not sweep me off my literary feet, and I care little for the characters.  The language doesn't get in my blood.  I want to be better, and I want my heroes to be better, as well.  I am not claiming to be an artist or a great poet, but I do want to be read, and understood.

Again, I am not sure what I am expecting.  I do know that few millennials have the sense of context that my generation was given.  Education has changed; history, aside from phenomena like Hamilton-the-musical, seems less pertinent to this generation.  We used to be able to look at a painting or hear a recording and place it in a timeline; not so, now.  Reading has changed for so many, and the way people perceive music.  They listen to so many things simultaneously, while multi-tasking; even volume has become subjective.  Art seems to play to this audience-- it is rare that I enter a gallery and find quiet simple canvasses.  There are crowds and chatter-- phones and selfies.  There is theatrical lighting and music and there is performance;  at my one and only visit to the new Whitney, there were roving performance artists; they were embarrassing and distracting.  I could not 'hear' the paintings.

But most of all there seems to be this sense of 'self'… I mean, even Andy Warhol had anxiety about his work-- insecurity.  A true artist hears his voice and executes as best he can, but he is never sure-- he has doubt and asks questions.  He knows his work is a process.  This culture seems to be so sure of itself-- so smug and narcissistic.  And a majority of the audience is obedient; they like what they are told to like, they hear what they are given, they wear what they think they should wear, what their 'icons' wear.  This worries me-- the diversion and commercialization of the process.  Art and fashion have become bedfellows; this has energized fashion but cheapened art.  And while I detest the massive cultural joke of Jeff Koons, I am also left cold by the more pretentious, dehumanized, technology-heavy exhibitions.  And there is so much out there-- trillions of images and soundbytes-- so much spectacle-- so many celebrities and events, a million channels.  How can we expect anyone to connect deeply and intimately with ideas the way one reads an old book in a quiet room?  Somewhere in every country, artists are despairing-- important canvasses and books are burning in a digital bonfire.  A sacred tree is surely falling at any given moment in a night forest, and no one will hear.

Still, I have this relentless need to communicate, which I think is the seed of all art, and a certain faith that I may touch even one person, or change something.  I suppose the experience of being dropped into a strange cultural river at 16 taught me a certain lesson… and I am grateful for The Bells of Rhymney, the riveting and beautiful words of a Welsh coal miner who educated himself, which somehow found their way into music and onto my teenage record player and changed my life.

Bewitched

All Hallow's Eve-eve back in the early 1960's was always known as Mischief Night.  While you slept, your house or parents' car might be egged, tagged, covered with toilet paper and goop, smashed pumpkin meat or worse.  You hoped for the best.  When we were teenagers, we went out and witnessed the terror, sometimes participated in a little naughtiness-- no serious damage but some spray paint and mess.  There was a woman on the block behind us who was reputed to be a witch.  She came home at 7 AM after God-knows-what with a black kerchief tied around her head, and her shades were drawn all day while presumably she slept along with the vampires and goblins of our neighborhood.  A broom was frequently leaning against the front door-- most likely for sweeping her stoop, but allegedly among us kids this was her night transportation.  I looked inside her mailbox many times-- mostly the same catalogues we all got in those days; her name was Eunice B. Harrison.  We addressed her this way when we made prank phone calls during the day… we spied on her and left dead bugs and cut fingernails and animal fur in shoeboxes on her windowsill.

Years later my Mom told me Mrs. Harrison was a nurse and she worked nights.  That's what you think, I told her.  I'd never seen her face-- didn't know if she was black or white… but she was our only local flesh-and-blood designated ghoul and we nourished her mythology with tales and conjecture.  Ironically, a few short years later we'd all be obsessing over Edgar Allen Poe, dying our hair and dressing up to hang out at Rocky Horror showings.  So much for the withered legend of Eunice B.

I sometimes wonder whether my neighbors' daughters perceive me as a kind of witch.  I dress in black, leave my apartment late at night wearing a hat and carrying a strange looking case; often returning at dawn, my blinds drawn against the sun so I can get some daytime sleep. Then again, they  have a multitude of horror apps at their fingertips, all-Vampire TV, the Twilight series in HD 24/7, etc.  We had to invent our own entertainment in those days; the Wizard of Oz was shown once a year and it was an event.  In New York City, every night is Mischief Night… and in most neighborhoods, watchful parents accompany their kids while they trick-or-treat; we were on our own.  Fear was personal.

Anyone who has kept watch over a sick child or relative knows that night-workers have a different mindset.  I spent a week in an intensive care ward when my son was six and had a dangerous pneumonia.  His roommate was a young woman who had lived her whole life on a respirator; she was virtually non-responsive, but her Mom chose to keep her alive this way.  Days were peaceful; the shift nurses chatted and ate sandwiches, watched TV and socialized with staff.  But the overnight nurse sat quietly in semi-dark.  She read to the girl-- sang to her at times.  There were 2 emergencies that week-- panicky alarming episodes which required huge x-ray machines to be moved in and used.  These both happened at night, when patients who are not sleeping are maybe anxious and frightened… when death feels a little nearer and the human mind is that much more vulnerable.

Coming home late nights on the subway, I am surrounded by day-sleepers, by this culture of people who are all a little pale, a little subdued, who are used to walking the streets with black shadows, who brush shoulders with the hunted and haunted who either do not or cannot sleep during these hours-- who plot and plan, create, think, suffer, drink, take drugs… stalk, worry, grieve, search and avoid.   We understand one another, we feel a certain kinship.  Most of us are on our way home; there are few destinations at these hours-- there is a sense of denouement, we are without rush, we rely on the unreliable timetables of night trains which travel with delays and issues; very few of us protest and fret. We are tired and insulated, surrounded by our own thoughts and fears-- some of us have had a nightcap or two and know that little will be resolved before tomorrow.  There is a small sense of relief.  We often share jokes and smiles.  There is entertainment and there are beggars, but most of these have given up by 4 AM.  We eat, we dream, we nap a little.  I read and think; we grumble less at the frequent disruptions and detours.  We feel relatively safe in this state of transition.  We are going home.

When I was a sophomore in college I had some small health issue that required a few days in the hospital while they analyzed some organ or other.  It was nothing serious, and I was so young I had to stay in the pediatric ward.  They treated me like a princess.  One night I woke up to find a really handsome young resident sitting by my bed reading volume 2 of Remembrance of Things Past which I had to finish for European Lit.  I pretended to be asleep-- was so surprised and charmed by this; and can remember so well the passage he read:  about love and instability and the fact that happiness neutralizes the suffering necessary to sustaining the instability which is at the core of passion-- something like this, in the Proustian universe.  I remember these pastel-colored paperback books which I loved and cherished and carried for a year, and still, despite the fact I have 4 versions of this novel-- I keep these, to remind me of where I have been and whom I have touched while I read, and how this world-view changed my life and taught me to dissect and observe and feel these tiny moments.

I think this doctor had a kind of crush on me; I was lovely then and so young I couldn't reciprocate any kind of mature emotion.  But I remember well feeling so embraced by the night-- even in a hospital-- this sense of being watched and understood and cared for… the opposite of fear.

Tonight I had to take my friend to an emergency room.  Medicine for her is state-provided and uncaring  and callous.  She is in the excruciating indescribable pain of late-stage cancer and the hopelessness of her case only seems to provoke hostility in staff because they are reminded of their ineffectuality.
She begged me to take her back home; anywhere but there, at night.  There are no handsome interns to watch over her and read her Proust.  There is no one.  I am helpless and annoying because anyone who is suffering less reminds her that she is quite alone.  She wants to die and yet I feel she holds some tiny thread of hope that this is all a nightmare, and she will wake up calm and pain-free.  I realize tonight that she, like all those about to die, must first bury their own dreams and that is tough.  I walked home across town in this pre-Halloween unsettled weather and thought about the souls which supposedly fly around freely for this one night.  They outnumber the living by myriads-- they and their memories, and their parents and children and lovers… and for my friend-- her dreams of being a great actress have dissipated into medicated dreams of swimming and floating and nightmarish twinges.

I am sure this October 31 that my Eunice B. Harrison is among these souls and rather than spending her nights making wicked mischief on a broomstick, she sat by the bedsides of tired patients and gave her life for their comfort and solace, and never defended her honor to a bunch of clueless, mean teenagers.   So in my modern Gothic lexicon, she is the ultimate Halloween saint; I salute her and wear her black cape of goodness as my costume and only pray she will in some version watch over my friend and weave a spell of sleep and carry her through to some better moment.

Bell Clear

When you are small, you learn to listen on Christmas Eve.  There was usually snow, which mutes the street noise, and the sound of old radiators clanking keeping you at the edge of sleep when you were already excited about stockings and presents.  I always swore I heard sleigh bells in the near distance, and sneaked out of bed to check the windows and make sure our Glasswax Santa-stencils looked perfect enough for the Man himself.

These years I am grateful for the bells of the Brick Church which chime out Christmas carols, and the muffled train whistles from  the Metro North.  The rain on Christmas eve was calm and quiet.  Two weeks ago a woman I'd known briefly-- a gorgeous, former Ford model who seemed to have everything-- had hung herself in her country house.  I tried not to miss things, and sat up through the night listening to Handel by the blinking lights of the tree feeling grateful for the simple gift of groceries.

Christmas night, I went down to the laundry room.  My building, during holidays, is quite deserted.  I have the job of taking in everyone's newspaper.  Someone, like a gift,  had left a toy piano on the folding table-- a real antique one, made of wood.  All the keys worked and I plunked out a few simple carols in the dark and had one of those Proustian moments remembering the one my older sister had been given so many years ago.  For some reason hers reminded me of Cinderella.  Maybe everything that year reminded me of Cinderella-- but I craved it and she wouldn't let me touch it until years later when she discarded it altogether and hid it in the basement where I secretly banged out songs to my heart's content.  It was magical.

That same year Santa brought me a set of those colored bells which was absolutely my best present ever.  It was tedious, but you could essentially manage most songs if you didn't care about octave accuracy.  The two blue ones were my favorites. I polished them and covered them at night with a doll blanket.  I'm sure they have tons of these on ebay.  They were called Freedom bells, or that's what I called them.

My sister and I have been estranged for years.  For a brief minute in the laundry room, I thought of her and her Cinderella piano, ribbons in her ponytail matching her red plaid Christmas dress.  That was the Freedomland year, the fantasy amusement park they built somewhere in the Bronx which our parents boycotted for some reason.  It had been plagued by financial woes, freak accidents and bad luck.  But we children were desperate to see it.  My sister was 10 or 11- in 6th grade, and I was only 7.  All the kids on our block, including our cousins, decided we were going to cut school one day and go.  We had bus maps and timetables.  We knew exactly how we would do it.  So we began-- bake sales, hot chocolate, lemonade stands, hoarding unicef pennies… until we had a small pile of savings which would get us onto all the rides, hot dogs and roundtrip tickets.  We planned it out to the last detail… and one night---who knows why-- my sister told our parents.  She did stuff like that-- unplanned, non-sequitur weird behavioral about-faces.  They got on the phone, alerted all the others, and we were not just punished but forced to turn over our earnings.  I was utterly miserable.

The next morning, my cousins came over and started screaming at me.  Apparently my sister told everyone I was the traitor.  I was too young to have any credibility, and of course it made sense that the 'baby', as they all taunted me, had tattled.  It was unbearable.  My sister wouldn't look at me, and took her punishment like a martyr.  But I was tormented, I was hated.  It was not just the devastating disappointment of my trip and the fact that I had donated my little Winnie the Poohs to the purse---  but it was maybe my first real betrayal.

I guess the neighborhood kids eventually forgave me; one of the nicer mothers tried to console us with the news that some child had been paralyzed by another accident, and it could have been us.  But my sister never apologized.  Not only that--- someone bent the clapper of my favorite bell so it didn't ring anymore.  My sister hated me.  Maybe just because she had to share our Mom, a closet, whatever.  But years later, there were similar betrayals-- boys I loved, money she stole, things I traded her so she wouldn't say malicious things about me.  I had to do damage control.

Among the things I miss at Christmas-- the people, the places-- my sister is not.  I occasionally think I should call her-- it is adult closure, isn't it?  But I don't; I don't even know her phone number.  Every time someone in my life does something mean-spirited or manipulative, I think of her, of how maybe these things warped me and taught me not to trust people.  But I do trust people.  Even when they do totally unexpected and unkind things.

My friend's dog bit him the other day-- not just a nick, but a deep, penetrating wound.  He didn't really mean it-- he was riled by another dog and got sort of confused.  Dogs don't really apologize, and I accepted my sister's behavior.  It was a lesson.  Years later I used to take my son down to Coney Island and we would watch the Cyclone for hours while we ate grilled corn and pretzels.  Neither of us will ever take the ride, but we liked to watch, from a distance.  I will never betray my son, and he knows it.  I can't say that for anyone else, but that's the way it is.

I went back down to the laundry room at 5 AM; I decided I'd adopt the piano-- maybe give it to my guitar player friend who would undoubtedly appreciate the nostalgia of its imperfect tuning…. but it was gone.   Like those Christmas-story ghost visitors, like my own Christmas vision-- it was there, I know it was there.. .and then it wasn't.

My cousin called to wish me a happy holiday.  We talked about the girl who hung herself and our kids, about Freedomland and my damaged bells.  She said she still has nightmares about my sister.  We had a great laugh and it felt good.  My son slept over and went to have a beer and watch basketball at our local bar.  We walked home in the clearing late afternoon light and listened to the train whistle and the church bells chiming out Joy to the World.  I didn't tell him about the bells, or the toy piano; he doesn't have that 'gene', as he says, but he stopped for a minute and took a shot of the train as it went into the Park Ave. tunnel.  We used to stand there for hours-- even in the rain, when he was small.  And right at that instant, as he pressed the camera button, the mall trees lit up, and it was Christmas, and for the moment, all was calm and all was bright.

Crowded Hearts

March is the month of betrayal.  Not officially, but it has always seemed that way.  December--- the end of the year--- we begin to know there are things we do not want to take with us into the new year… but-- well, it's Christmas, and no one wants to rock the family boat… then January, we are all so exhausted, and cold;  February---well, one of my friends told me he'd wait until after Valentine's Day to tell his girlfriend he no longer loves her… but by March-- -really no excuse, and we're all getting geared up for spring and new beginnings. The baggage we have dragged from the icy winter--- well, it just looks tired and the weight is unbearable.

I have seen the husbands of friends with other women-- having an intimate coffee, brushing a stray hair from her forehead the way lovers do.  I have learned of other sad infidelities and indiscretions.  I am not a moralist; I am a rock musician.  I do not judge.  But somehow the word 'fuck' is not to me a random curse, or even a wishful verb; in the month of March it sounds something like religion.

Actually betrayal is all around us-- we are just too weary and pre-occupied to look it in the eye.  Your boyfriend could be texting virtually anyone at any time.  Phone calls used to be surreptitious and obvious--- the middle of the night ringing, the hang-ups, the strange envelopes under your door… there used to be a certain romance to betrayal.  Now it is just a cheap tweet.  

There are artistic betrayals, too: people who steal our ideas, our lyrics, our melodies.  And people who misquote and misinterpret us.  Friends and family who brand us punk-rockers when we are trying to be rootsy and real: haters who call us 'jazzers' or teenagers who call us old fucks.  I have learned never to feel betrayed by a teenager; I do not underestimate their penchant for truth.  

Today I walked in the rain through the Harlem Meer.  There were seagulls croaking and squawking the sounds of the sea.  This may be as close as I get to the beach, and they seemed to know that.  A small family was throwing bread to the ducks, and the children were as happy as children can be--- no toys, no babysitters--- just some old sandwiches and the little quackers.  A gull came right up to me, inquisitive and bold.  Its head was whiter than it should have been, with the dingy mud-slush and the smutty fog of the last day of this long grey New York winter.  It knew I had no food.  But it still gave me that tilted head stare, and we locked in.  

So I had one of those Proustian moments-- remembering my pre-school teacher, Mlle. Jeanne (we had to speak French there for some pretentious reason) had brought me this exquisite hand-cut wooden jigsaw of a Nantucket gull perched on a wooden buoy.  I was home with a broken leg which had happened chez l'ecole because I threw myself wildly on a forbidden piece of playground equipment and managed to snap 2 bones in several places.  

I must have developed some kind of relationship with this patchwork gull, whose every fragment I memorized-- struggling over and over with the puzzle, and with my sedentary confinement.  My parents put me in front of the old black and white set most of the time, or outside in the yard with blankets, like a 1950's polio victim on a chaise.  But Mlle. Jeanne-- a spinsterly nun-like woman with woolen dresses and no rings-- brought me a puzzle and a book called Teach Me to Read.  I spent afternoons with this book until I was ready for Dick and Jane and then Curious George and Madeleine and Eloise.  By the time my cast was re-sized, I was into Nancy Drew and the Hollisters and everything I could get my hands on that wasn't censored.  No one but Mlle. Jeanne paid much attention to my education--- just my ponytail and little dresses, because pants were impossible.  Sometimes she sang with me-- little French songs like 'Les Tiserands'… and music from Gigi and The Sound of Music.  Rounds and harmonies.  

I emerged from the cast a profoundly changed human, with thoughts and dreams and stories and a sense of independence rare in 4-year olds, because I had created my own inner world called Nantucket.  I could now walk to the library where I began with the A's and read every single book in our little local branch, systematically--- including the Scott's postage stamps catalogues.  I graduated from Nursery School and Miss Jean, after trying in vain to convince my parents that I belonged in Music Academy, told me their hearts were crowded in a way that hers was not.  This was a great lesson I was to take with me; whenever something doesn't work out, someone's heart is crowded.  My ex-husband's, my parents'-- mine, occasionally.   Miss Jean was told not to come back: maybe my first betrayal; but she had given me the tools with which to cope.  I never learned her last name.  

But what I suddenly realized this afternoon, looking at that whiter-than-white gull in the late afternoon haze… the biggest betrayal of all is the one we inflict on ourselves.  We let ourselves down; we forget who we were, who we are, and we turn into our own grouchy husband or wife.  We forget to love, we forget to look down at the cobblestones which are the sidewalk by the Harlem Meer and see a lost pink barrette as something meaningful.  We forget to pick up coins and smile at people and walk slowly through the aisles of a grocery store and wait patiently for the annoying lady with the walker to handle every single can of stewed tomatoes and not buy a single thing.  We forget to listen for the sea and we forget to love the unlovable which sometimes includes ourselves when we are broken or betrayed or about to be.

Guest List

I am having a fucked-up day.  Not the day, exactly, but me.  Yes, the cold air was a stern memo that Thanksgiving is closing in, and that huge meal-- -with the guests you haven't even invited-- is looming like a turkey-flavored noose in your kitchen that needs new plaster and paint, suitable lighting, and a functioning oven.  Calls have backed up on voicemail--- your usual dinner companions with that slight impatient edge in their tone which could either mean--- what's up with the delayed invitation?-- or maybe, gee, if you're slammed this year, I could go out to the Hamptons with my co-workers….I almost regret the timing of my broken wrist this summer; it would have been the perfect excuse.  Maybe I'll be diagnosed with something hideous and this will be the last supper… or none at all.  I hate myself when I get this way.  I really enjoy entertaining, I am in general such a terrible friend these days that a single festive dinner can be a great purging of hostess-guilt.

But suddenly it seems as though last year was just a few weeks ago.  Like instead of looking forward to holidays, they are tracking me.  They stalk me with accusatory ribbon-clad fingers and they ring bells which are out of tune with my tinnitus B-flat.  Maybe it was the Mexican cashier in Asssociated today who when I asked him which were the pears on sale looked me right in the eye and said 'they're not here'.  No apology, no courtesy--- a kind of resentment that he has to ring up groceries for people who are as poor as he is, and who remind him that his debit card is overdrawn with things like cans of coke and snickers bars.  Or maybe it's that I'm out of rice and didn't feel like hauling another 20-pound bag onto the counter so Juan-Carlos can give me Mexican attitude.  I just dumped some tomato sauce on oatmeal.  The God's truth.

Turn back the clock---I used to get that brisk fall air electric feeling--- sex is great under blankets, and Christmas parties were amazing…and the Mexican cashiers fell over themselves to pack my bags and begged to deliver.  Pears?  Take these--- we'll just throw them in-- no charge.  Men asked for your number in the aisles, women exchanged recipes and admired your shoes, even babies held out their arms.  A trip to the grocery store was an adventure.  It was also necessary leveling.  You felt like a wife-- a mother.  The rest of the day?  Men held doors for you, stuck notes in your pocket.  You were shining.

And so much of it is my own fault.  My girlfriends and men friends tell me I make no effort--- or make an effort not to make an effort.  I'm too tired of myself to consider this or its alternative.  I skip calls, fail to RSVP, spend way too much time on the internet when I'm supposed to be learning how to use Logic Pro.  I am writing-- -that is there--- it's just the execution, the recording--- the directions and effort seem so tedious and impossible.  I'm chronically under-published and unsung.  Tonight someone I actually knew spent $142,000,000 on a painting-- -someone with a lovely wife who makes an effort--- and I am sitting here considering the Warholian irony of introducing Francesco Rinaldi to the Quaker Oats man.

I'm here in layers of old sweats, my coagulated meal in a bowl that looks unwashable, and I actually, rather than sparring with the help screens of my Logic, type in 'what do you do when you feel messed up?'  And I am taken to some website that tells me I must accept that Tinkerbell is dead and let Jesus in.  Okay.  A small stage laugh, here.  But I never particularly liked Tinkerbell….what I did like was the relationship… that a wild flying boy and a fairy had this intimacy… it made me feel better about life.

Last night my first husband called me to tell me he's getting married.  Or maybe he's already married…to a 29 year old six-foot-tall model whose picture online is somewhere between a Victoria's Secret angel and a stripper profile body-shot.  Of course she is using him for his rockstar connections; he is 66 and unwell but still gets royalties and has a free pass to the few stellar recording studios on this continent.  There is a youtube clip of her getting thrown offstage at the Apollo amateur night just a few months ago.  To be kind, they only allowed a mini-second of actual singing…and who really cares because her legs are amazing and she rocked the lace camisole and the hair weave.  And he sounded so happy…. and really, he came to me in my 20's after meeting backstage--- with a ring and a proposal.  We scarcely knew one another.  It was exciting--- it was lovely and passionate and magical.   So why begrudge him a bit of senior happiness?

The thing is…everything ends.  Your happy marriage, even if you stay together, generally ends.  Your passionate affair.  Your first night.  Your first love.  Your ballet career.  Your second love.  A great film.  Your third love.  Songs.  Symphonies.  Your best gig.  Even Proust ends.  There are no more pages, at a certain point.  I suppose you can be pragmatic and spend your life preparing for the end, like financial advisors counsel us, but there is no emotional pension plan.  You can wait until your husband tells you he doesn't love you, or you can take off the first night you feel the slightest inclination to turn over and sleep facing the wall.  That was my style, I guess.  Maybe it was fear.  I'll never know.

What I do know is that you can't really control the end.  You can prepare for it--- you can even become isolated and accustomed to solitude… but then you miss so much fun.  Pleasure and pain.  It's hard to recognize the midpoint between your youth and your old age.  Not everyone goes out like Lou Reed with a loving intelligent companion and a disease which lets you slow down until you've stopped, and the world mourning your loss and acknowledging your value.  And not everyone loses their memory like my Mom who isn't sure whether she's a child or a grandmother.

Memory can be painful.  Good memories--- bad memories… Last night my ex-husband told me he loved me 'like a thirsty man' and never forgave himself for turning gold into brass… and me for failing to see him through his wild years.  I couldn't stand the anticipated end and I made my exit.  Trust me--it felt equally as bad as being left.

So 30 years later, he has that feeling-- a wedding feeling-- and I don't have the heart to tell him--- he is crazy and blind, and the coming hurt will kill him, maybe.  He is fragile.  The girl has friended me on Facebook and wants to have coffee.  I will give her a gift.  I will go to the Tinkerbell website and type in 'what do you give your aging ex-husband's sexy child-bride as a token of your support?'  Let Jesus in, it will say.  Even though you are a fairy-murderer,  even though you are a cranky old loner who talks to insane jazz musicians and ex-husbands at 4 AM.

So I am wondering… whether Jesus prefers mushroom or chestnut stuffing, and if he'd like to bring a date.